“Pretentious” is an overused word, its meaning possibly worn down (admittedly, so is an introduction that calls something well-worn, only to explain its ongoing relevance), but GIRLS AGAINST BOYS, in all its armchair-feminist glory, is exactly that. Existing as a logline to reel in genre fans and hinging on a director’s name to excite the art houses, the film (which had its world premiere at the current SXSW festival) will, in truth, satisfy neither.

This may not be what any serious fan of the so-far stellar [REC] series wants to hear, but the departure that is [REC] 3 is possibly the sweetest, most endearing film I’ve seen in quite some time; throat rips, chainsaws, gut munches and vicious possessed included.

Like SCREAM, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is going to be mistaken by some people for a spoof of the genre. It’s not; like the Wes Craven film, it’s a straightforward horror feature that happens to have a good, satirical sense of humor about itself. This one goes beyond honoring just one subspecies of fright to become a wildly entertaining catch-all homage to the cinema of fear as a whole—it’s like all your favorite horror movies wrapped up in one.

To the short list of remakes that rep significant improvements over their predecessors, one can add SILENT HOUSE. Adapting last year’s Uruguayan film (a.k.a. LA CASA MUDA), OPEN WATER filmmakers Chris Kentis and Laura Lau have solved a couple of key problems that undercut their source material and come up with a taut and chilling real-time experience.

Nicolas Cage is the cursed Johnny Blaze again in GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, and the movie is kind of cursed as well, in the sense that while it’s better than you might expect, it’s not as good as you might hope.

Nebraska filmmaker Patrick Rea and his SenoReality Pictures company (co-founded by Rea, Ryan S. Jones and Josh Robison) have been slowly but surely building a name for themselves on the regional independent horror scene. They have honed their craft as a seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of short films—two of which, WOMEN’S INTUITION and GET OFF MY PORCH, have won regional Emmys—and saw their first feature THE EMPTY ACRE released in 2007. And they’ve continued to do so in their second feature, NAILBATER.

Found-footage movies tend, by their very nature, to deal with intimate subjects; the form doesn’t easily lend itself to spectacle, which generally requires multiple points of view. Director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis find a way around this in CHRONICLE, a sort of superhero-origin story grounded in the portrait of a young man dangerously losing his mind.